Let My Journey Pave the Way for Yours

Article Promotion with Twitter

You just wrote an amazing article. You researched for days and spent six hours writing and re-writing. You’re proud of it! Now how the heck are you going to get people to read it? How are you going to use this epic piece of craftsmanship to attract new readers to your site?

SEO is certainly part of the equation, but the power of social media shouldn’t be ignored.

What Social Media Sites Should You be Using?

Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn… It seems like there are so many options! What to choose? Pat Flynn says you need to “be everywhere,” but even he concentrates on a few channels.

The answer is that you’re going to have to experiment. It depends on what suits you, your niche, and the audience you’re after. Sorry, Pat, but you can’t be everywhere. Choose one or two channels and see how they work for you, then expand.

I’m a complete social media retard (maybe I’m not supposed to use that word in 2015, but I am). Maybe I’m too old. I love sailing forums, and I’ve dabbled in Facebook. I can go months between checking my feed, though. So it was with great trepidation that I started to research different social media “channels” to choose a first one to experiment with.

Why I Chose Twitter

Twitter has always baffled me. I’ve made fun of it for years. I had a strong bias against choosing Twitter as my first foray into social media promotion. But I chose it anyways.

Again and again, bloggers quoted Twitter as one of their most important tools for promoting their content and engaging their audience. It was enough to pique my interest and so I took the plunge…

My sister-in-law is a professional photographer. Pinterest and Instagram are perfect for her. My content is very wordsy. It wouldn’t lend itself well to these channels at all.

Beyond that, I didn’t use a lot of science:

Reddit is powerful but is a community with many rules and I’m dabbling there now.

Facebook seems to baffle a lot of bloggers because of frequent changes to their formats and the algorithm used to place your posts in people’s feeds. I’m sure I’ll circle back to that one.

I use LinkedIn for professional networking but have never seen it as more than that. I’m sure many would disagree with me, but I don’t see it now.

Google+ is a complete unknown to me. I don’t have a single friend who uses it.

I have no idea what tumblr even is.

So that left me with Twitter by a process of elimination.

First Impressions

I’m not going to write a big how-to or analysis. I’m still trying to figure out how best to use this Twitter thing. Here are some initial thoughts after a few weeks on Twitter:

People keep signing up to follow me daily just based on Twitter suggesting me to them as someone they might want to follow.

I have had some good, high quality traffic from my tweets, some of which has “converted” by signing up for my email list.

I’ve slowly started to build relationships with fellow bloggers and online entrepreneurs by responding to their tweets.

I find that I get inundated with people’s tweets. I can’t follow it all and I miss some gems, I’m sure. I think I need to make some Lists to quiet the noise.

I know I’ve just scratched the surface here. I need to learn about using hashtags to my advantage, and scheduling tweets with Buffer or Hootsuite.

So far, though, I think that Twitter’s paying off for me and will likely be part of my long-term plan for this blog. Come find me on Twitter and let me know if you agree: Follow @ChrisJourneyman

What is your experience with promoting articles on Social Media? Share in the comments below.

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